Well it's about time we had some great news from Bob Stewart our Active Rain Community Evangelist.

Thanks to all our wonderful bloggers out there who continue to pour out their hearts and whatever else they are feeling like sharing. Stay tuned to Bob Stewart for more bug fixes that are in process ....

ActiveRain Traffic Skyrockets Over 65% In The Last Three Weeks

I've been looking at the traffic numbers on ActiveRain for 8 years. Not since our very first year, in 2007, have I seen the type of traffic growth in such a short period of time that we are currently experiencing on ActiveRain. In our past, traffic growth has always been a more gradual process, so it's beyond exciting to see this more aggressive growth pattern.

(Seriously, I rarely sleep as I think about seeing the numbers for the next day)

For the last 8 months, as we've made small tweaks here and there, and even one large move to ActiveRain, I've started almost every day at my computer looking at our Google Analytics to see if our changes resulted in extra traffic.........and then three weeks ago, I started losing sleep.......(in a good way)

Over the last three weeks, traffic to your blog posts on ActiveRain is up 67.75% over the previous three week time frame. This increase in traffic has primarly been driven by more organic visits from Google.

After watching this trend for the last three weeks, we're really excited to share it with you today.

(as a side note, the big dip you see at the very right is because this graph is showing you weekly traffic and we aren't to the end of the current week yet. If I were to take this screenshot at the end of the week, that last dot would be a lot higher on the chart)

We believe that we are starting to see the results of a serious investment made in SEO during the last eight months of development cycles. Since SEO is more art than science, we've been relying heavily on the SEO expertise of Mark Munroe and his team of SEO specialists at Trulia as we've made a series of tweaks to the underlying code on ActiveRain. Combine this with the bold move that we made back in April, pulling the ActiveRain domain under the Trulia domain, and we believe we have completely stemmed the tide, after experiencing some declining traffic numbers in mid 2013.

Organic search engine traffic (mainly Google) is driving all of the traffic growth we've seen in the last three weeks. Most of the other sources of traffic (think Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc) have remained relatively flat (small incremental growth) in comparison to this relative explosion of organic search engine traffic.

How Can You Take Advantage?

Get writing!

Rainmakers, take advantage of this rising tide of traffic! To celebrate this surge in traffic, through the end of this week (ending on Sunday at 11:59pm Pacific Time) every blog post you write will be given 500 points instead of 200 points.

And remember, you don't have to recreate the wheel. We give you blogging blueprints you can use for any of the high impact posts, designed to generate more prospects for your business. We have blueprints for your listings, writing about condo complexes and subdivisions, writing about community events and local businesses, market reports, homes for sale with a certain feature and a few others as well. The blueprints will give you the exact formula to take advantage of this surge in traffic.

So That's It? Nothing Else To Work On?

Of course, for us, there's more to work on. SEO has ALWAYS been a moving target. Sometimes, like right now, you appear to be hitting the target, and the next thing you know, you look up and the target moved. With the full power of Trulia's SEO team behind your blogging efforts here at ActiveRain, I would expect a steady stream of arrows right around the bullseye, which is what we are seeing now.

Many of you realize that the good old days of 'post just about anything you want and it will land on the first page of Google' are no longer in full swing. Google's web spam team has been hard at work ensuring that only the best content finds its way to the first page.

ActiveRain members have still found the first page, with regular frequency, but not always in the top positions on the first page. And it was getting more and more challenging to accomplish page one rankings on Google. Quality content still rules the day, but our continued effort to appease the Google Gods seems to be paying off as more and more of your content is finding its way back up the search engines rankings.

As promised, we'll continue to keep you updated as things develop. And, because it's just good practice, we will continue making small tweaks to our SEO here on ActiveRain to make sure we do everything we can to get your content in front of real, interested buyers and sellers (or whoever your target consumer is). All you need to do is keep writing great content!

What's Next?

Along with our normal clean up (I know many of you are clamoring to get back your 'following' link so you can more easily find posts from people you follow. That will be back July 15th along with a host of other bug fixes) we have some awesome updates coming for comments (think: being able to tag your friends in comments and 'like' comments). And then, right after that, you're going to see a much more expanded stats section on ActiveRain. If your question right now is 'how do I tell if my post specifically is getting more traffic?', the answer is coming soon!

And If You Are Still Reading

Of course, we're going to spread this message far and wide. I'm beyond excited for all of you and the payoff for the hard work you've put into staying consistent with your blogging.

But maybe you'd be willing to help us share the message? Between now and Sunday, if you tag the ActiveRain Real Estate Network in a post on Facebook, where you share this announcement, or if you share it on Twitter and tag @ActiveRain, we are going to randomly select 5 people and send you an ActiveRain T-shirt. And we'll pick one person to win a $50 Visa gift card.